Cultural Transfers in the German Entertainment Industries – Production Networks and Imagined Geographies.
Antje Dietze (SFB 1199)
Abstract
Over the course of the 19th century, modern entertainment industries grew rapidly and became an important realm of cultural transfers and internationalization. They brought mass audiences in contact with cultural products and imagery from all over the world. One of the largest live entertainment industries in Germany at the time was variety theater. It emerged in the decades marked both by the consolidation of the recently united German nation-state and a phase of intense globalization between the 1880s and the First World War. This was a very transnational business – it relied on a high mobility of performers and constant transfers of new formats and attractions. The presentation traces the emergence of these networks and institutions of cultural transfer and asks how they shaped Germany’s relation to the world. It brings together reflections on cultural transfer as a space-producing process with recent studies in transnational history on the geographies of entanglements and the specific forms and patterns that shaped the circulation of knowledge, people or goods. In a first step, I lay out the geographical contours of the production networks, using GIS-based mapping. Secondly, I relate these findings to the imagined geographies that were presented in the variety shows. This leads to a reflection of the different dimensions of cultural transfer and the way it reconfigures the relationship of both the production networks and the produced images with the nation and the world.
Biographical Note
Dr. Antje Dietze (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Antje Dietze studied cultural studies in Leipzig and Paris, earning her PhD in 2012 from Leipzig University for a work on the role of cultural organizations and artistic practice during the post-socialist transition in Germany. As part of her current research she spent 2014/15 as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) P.R.I.M.E. research fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the University of Montreal (Canada). Her research interests include entertainment and the arts, cultural industries, and cultural change within the study of culture and transnational history, focusing particularly on Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
this Event is Part of https://research.uni-leipzig.de/transfertsculturels/de/kulturtransfer/